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WORK TITLE: Finding Charity’s Folk
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https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5569
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of California, Irvine, associate professor.
MEMBER:Societies American Historical Association, Association for the Study of the World Wide African Diaspora, Organization of American Historians, Association of Black Women Historians, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Southern Association of Women Historians, Maryland Historical Society.
AWARDS:Association of Black Women’s Historians Letitia Woods Brown Award for best article on African American Women’s History, 2007; grants from the American Association of University Women, the Daughters of the Colonial Wars, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Maryland Historical Society, and the Organization of American Historians.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Black Women in America Encyclopedia, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 2005; and The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2012. Contributor to periodicals, including Labour/Le Travail, Journal of African American History, Women’s History Review, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies.
SIDELIGHTS
Jessica Millward earned her doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles and then went on to become an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is an expert in African-American history, slavery, emancipation, the African diaspora, and the intersections between gender and law. Millward has additionally studied migration and citizenship in the Black Atlantic, as well as domestic violence and sexual assault perpetrated upon African-American women in the late nineteenth century. Her articles on related topics have appeared in such periodicals as Labour/Le Travail, Journal of African American History, Women’s History Review, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Millward has also contributed chapters to Black Women in America Encyclopedia and The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States.
In her first full-length book, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland, Millward traces the path that Charity Folks took from enslavement to emancipation. The author uses this through line to trace how a community of black women, both enslaved and free, worked to form community in Annapolis, Maryland. From attempting to survive from attempting to resist, Millward explores how black women raised their children and supported one another within the confines of oppression. Millward profiles Folk’s descendants as well as the descendants of the Ridouts, the family who “owned” her. Folk’s ancestors are profiled as well, and Millward draws on historical records and archives tracing manumission records and slave trades across Ghana, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other primary documents include runaway slave advertisements, letters, diaries, and wills.
Praising Finding Charity’s Folk in her Journal of Southern History assessment, Nicole Ribianszky remarked: “Overall, the book provides an illuminating window on the linking of slavery and freedom for women, and how each shaped the other.” The critic added: “Millward has succeeded at providing a profound remembrance of Folks and Maryland’s other women of color.” Tamika Nunley, writing in the online Civil War Book Review was also impressed, and she stated that the volume “looks to the claims of the enslaved as the most authentic source of freedom.” Nunley then concluded: “While so many missing pieces of the story could have deepened the interventions of this study, Millward managed to take existing shards of evidence along with an intellectual ethos of prioritizing the experiences of black women, to craft an important contribution to the canon of African American women’s history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, May, 2017, Nicole Ribianszky, review of Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland.
ONLINE
Civil War Book Review, http://www.cwbr.com/ (October 22, 2017), Tamika Nunley, review of Finding Charity’s Folk.
University of California, Irvine, Website, https://www.faculty.uci.edu/ (November 7, 2017), author profile.*
JESSICA MILLWARD
Associate Professor, History
School of Humanities
Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, United States History
Phone: History Department: (949) 824-6521
Email: millward@uci.edu
University of California, Irvine
Department of History
200 Murray Krieger Hall
Irvine, CA 92697
picture of Jessica Millward
Research
Interests Comparative slavery and emancipation, African American History, the African Diaspora, Gender and Women, Law and Society
URL www.jessicamillward.com
Academic
Distinctions Academic Honors:
» Association of American University Women Post Doctoral Fellowship, 2006-2007
» Lord Baltimore Fellowship, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD, 2004–2006
» Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, African-American Studies and Research
Program, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003–2004
» Nathan Huggins/Benjamin Quarles Dissertation Research Award, Organization of
American Historians, 2003
» Research Fellow, David Library of the American Revolution, Washington
Crossing, PA, 2001–2002
» Recipient of the Association of Black Women’s Historians Letitia Woods Brown Award for best article on African American Women’s History, 2007.
Appointments Association of American University Women Post Doctoral Fellowship, 2006-2007.
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, African-American Studies and Research
Program, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2003–2004.
Research
Abstract Dr. Millward's first book, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black women in Maryland will be published in Fall 2015 as part of the Race in the Atlantic World series, Athens: University of Georgia Press. She is also working on two additional projects. The first is centered on migration and citizenship in the Black Atlantic, 1770-1860. The other focuses on African American women's experiences with sexual assault and intimate partner violence through the end of the 19th century. Her research has been supported by the American Association of University Women; the Daughters of the Colonial Wars; the David Library of the American Revolution; the Maryland Historical Society; as well as the Organization of American Historians.
Dr. Millward is a founding member of the UCI Ghana Project, is an educational and cultural exchange program between faculty, students, and staff at the University of California Irvine and the University of Ghana, Legon. For three weeks during summer 2010, UCI collaborated with the Kwame Nkrumah Institute for African Studies, the Ghana Dance Ensemble, and the Department of Dance at the University of Ghana, Legon. The project’s theme for 2010-2011 is “Collaborative Conversations on the Continent: Exploring the cultural axis between Africa and America.”
Dr. Millward holds affiliate status with the following programs at UCI: African American Studies, the Culture and Theory Program, the Department of Women’s Studies as well as the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Center for Comparative Immigration at UC San Diego as well as a member of the Organization of American Historian’s Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories.
Publications Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). http://amzn.com/0820348783
"Black Women's History and the Labor of Mourning," Souls, 18:1, (2016) 161-165.
Mumia: Hope and Vulnerability. thefeministwire.com. January 23, 2014. http://thefeministwire.com/2014/01/mumia-vulnerability-and-hope/
On Agency, Freedom and the Boundaries of Slavery Studies. Labour/Le Travail, 71(Spring 2013), 193-202.
Charity Folks, Loss Royalty and the Bishop Family of Maryland and New York. Journal of African American History, 98(1 (Winter 2013), 24-47.
That All Her Increase Shall Be Free': Enslaved Women's Bodies and the Maryland 1809 Law of Manumission. Women's History Review, 21(3) June 2012, 363-378.
The Relics of Slavery’: Inter-racial Sex and Manumission in the American South. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 31(3), 22-30
Teaching African American History in the Age of Obama. Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 2009, 55(25), B20 .
More History Than Myth: African American Women's History since the Publication of Ar'n't I a Woman". Journal of Women's History, vol. 19(No. 2), 161-167.
Reviews:
» Review Essay, Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) in The Journal of American History, June 2009, Vol. 96 Issue 1, 233.
» Making Slavery: Making Race: The Experiences of Slave Women in the New World, Review Essay for H-Atlantic, Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 (July 2005).
» Review Essay, Gad Heuman and James Walvin, Editors The Slavery Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), in The Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Vol. 1 (Spring 2005).
Encyclopedia Entries:
» “Manumission,” in Daina Ramey Berry, Ed., The Female Slave: An Encyclopedia of Daily Life During Slavery in the United States, (Greenwood, Ct: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2012): 187-190.
» “Colonial America,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Editor. Black Women in America Encyclopedia, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005: pp. 286–291.
» “Tituba,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Editor. Black Women in America Encyclopedia, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005: pp. 248–250.
Grant Humanities Research Travel Grant, University of California, Irvine, 2009; International Center for Writing and Translation, University of California, Irvine, 2009; Association of American University Women Post Doctoral Fellowship, 2006-2007; Lord Baltimore Fellowship, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD, 2004–2006; Nathan Huggins/Benjamin Quarles Dissertation Research Award, Organization of American Historians, 2003.
Professional
Societies American Historical Association
Association for the Study of the World Wide African Diaspora
Organization of American Historians
Association of Black Women Historians
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Southern Association of Women Historians
Maryland Historical Society
Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
Other Experience Founding Faculty, UCI Collaborative Conversations on the Continent
Ghana Project 2010
Farwesten Regional Director
Association of Black Women Historians 2014
Research Center African American Studies, the Culture and Theory Program, the Department of Women’s Studies, the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, Center for Comparative Immigration at UC San Diego
Link to this profile http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5569
Last updated 10/13/2017
Finding Charity's Folic Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland
Nicole Ribianszky
Journal of Southern History. 83.2 (May 2017): p409.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Finding Charity's Folic Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. By Jessica Millward. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 130. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4878-0; cloth. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3108-9.)
The clever title of Jessica Millward's monograph Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland serves the dual purpose of naming the subject. Charity Folks, and, as its play on words promises, examining her surrounding community of women of color, enslaved and free. At a time of a contemporary movement in the United States like "Say Her Name," which recognizes the black women who die as a result of police violence, it is no less fitting, as Millward notes in her book, to "honor enslaved women's call to be remembered by telling their stories and speaking their names" (p. xxi). Millward, an associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, revives the memory of Folks, who traversed the distance from enslavement to freedom, and highlights the biographical details of Folks's life while situating her within the larger context of her family and her local community in Annapolis, Maryland. Millward argues that "enslaved women must be seen as architects of their own freedom. Freedom was not bestowed on them; they worked for it" (p. 12).
Location made a difference in the experience of enslavement and freedom in determining the size of the free community, access to manumission. and mobility. The sense of place is strongly conveyed in Finding Charity's Folk. During her research Millward visited some of the buildings and other spaces that Folks inhabited during her life as well as her final resting place. She also drew on Folks's descendants to give insights on their matriarch and other family members. Additionally. Millward met with current individuals of the Ridout family, whose ancestors owned Folks and her family. These connections impart an intimacy between the past and present that is often lacking in historical monographs. Millward's efforts to involve the descendant community, coupled with the extensive records from archives in Ghana, Great Britain, and the United States, including over 1,500 manumission records, family papers collections, runaway slave advertisements, letters, wills, and journals, provide ample sources for her study.
There is a strong emphasis on the gendered reality of slavery and freedom throughout the book. Enslaved women seized on whatever means were at their disposal to actualize their own freedom and that of their children and other family members. Indeed, Millward argues that freedom, rather than being exclusively an individual act, was communal. Children were often manumitted with their mothers, or they continued in slavery until a later time. Particularly in her last two chapters, she elaborates on family and the creative strategies that women used to secure and maintain freedom through a range of activities, including using the courts, participating fully in the labor market to provide a financial cushion for their households, and working proactively to obtain beneficial apprenticeships for their children.
Overall, the book provides an illuminating window on the linking of slavery and freedom for women, and how each shaped the other. One minor criticism is that Millward incorporates other historians' findings directly into the text throughout the four chapters in Finding Charity's Folk. The discussion of secondary work would be more appropriate in her endnotes as it has the effect of diminishing her authoritative voice at times. Aside from that, Millward has succeeded at providing a profound remembrance of Folks and Maryland's other women of color who left a legacy that makes it unlikely they will be "lost to history" (p. 67).
Nicole Ribianszky
Georgia Gwinnett College
Ribianszky, Nicole
Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland
by Millward, Jessica
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Retail Price: $49.95
Issue: Summer 2016
ISBN: 9780820331089
Redefining Opportunity: Charity Folk’s Life in Slavery and Freedom
The life of a woman named Charity Folks, who survived slavery and charted a path to freedom, anchors Jessica Millward’s study of African American women’s experiences in early national Maryland. The author applies biographical and genealogical approaches to craft a social history of the experiences of enslaved and free black women in the mid-Atlantic. Millward aligns her work with scholarship that looks to the claims of the enslaved as the most authentic source of freedom. In four thematically organized chapters, the story of Charity Folks offers broader glimpses into the ways enslaved and free black women envisioned and acted upon their claims to freedom in eighteenth and nineteenth century Maryland.
Laws designed to protect slavery made bondage inheritable through enslaved women. In the first chapter, Millward delves into a gender analysis of reproduction and the manner in which motherhood shaped the imperatives of black women in freedom. Probing questions interrogating the real logistical challenges of socializing children while at the same time being denied full authority over the lives of children, helps us to understand just how exceptional enslaved mothers were in exhausting every avenue to teach children strategies of survival and resistance. Thus, Millward captures the tensions between the profitable effects of reproduction on the slavery economy and the real human experiences of “the joys and heartbreaks” that accompany child bearing and parenting. The bond shared among families, and mothers in particular, led many women like Charity Folks to envision a life of freedom that included other family members.
Petitions for freedom reveal the legal strategies that black women employed to secure their freedom. Explored in the second chapter, Millward examines petitions to show black women’s desires to shape a legacy of freedom for family and loved ones. When petitions proved ineffective, women like Charity Folks found alternative routes to petitioning by negotiating privately with slaveholders to secure freedom. These negotiations could involve some form of payment, apprenticeship arrangement, or even years of building relationships with malleable slaveowners that agreed to gradually grant freedom. Subsequently, the next chapter segues into how such private negotiations manifested into possible windows of manumission, which some slaveowning families like the Ridouts and the Snowdens executed gradually or in groups that involved the freedom of close relatives. Likewise, Charity Folks became free along with members of her family, giving her the rare experience of preserving familial ties during an era when slavery threatened to tear families apart. Once freed, as Millward observes in the final chapter, free black women and men organized their families in close communities, and found work as washerwomen, apprentices, and wage laborers. In some instances, such as the case with Charity Folks, former bondwomen managed to acquire property that they would eventually bequeath to their progeny.
This study of the life of Charity Folks contributes to understandings of slavery and freedom in Maryland by offering important evidence of the possibilities and even exceptions that black women experienced in eighteenth and nineteenth century Maryland. As Millward demonstrates, these exceptional circumstances represented breakthroughs carefully conceptualized by enslaved women themselves. While Maryland continued to make efforts to circumscribe the lives of both free and enslaved black women, men, and children, black women such as Charity Folks charted a path that enabled a rich legacy for the Folks and Bishop families to thrive even today. While so many missing pieces of the story could have deepened the interventions of this study, Millward managed to take existing shards of evidence along with an intellectual ethos of prioritizing the experiences of black women, to craft an important contribution to the canon of African American women’s history.
Tamika Nunley is an Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College. Her book manuscript “By Stealth”: Black Women’s Strategies for Survival, Resistance and Self-Making, 1830-1865, examines the manner in which free black women challenged race and gender based legal proscriptions by legally and illegally reconstituting their lives and labors.